Graveyard Rules of the Appalachian Mountains

Dear Shadow Tribe,

The Appalachian rules I previously posted (link) keep you from getting lost in the forest or answering something that is not there. These mountain graveyard rules keep you from bringing something home that you don't want to follow you.

Old burying grounds in the Appalachian mountains are usually small, often on a hill, sometimes half-sunk into the woods. Family plots. Church yards that closed when the congregation moved or died out. Stones lean. Names wear off. Trees and weeds spring up. People still treat them carefully.

The ones I heard growing up:

1) Do not step on a grave. Walk between them. Stepping on one is bad luck at best. At worst it wakes whatever is still attached to the place. People who grew up mowing church yards still step around the sunken places.

2) Do not whistle. Same rule as the woods, only tighter. Sound carries farther when the trees are thinner and the ground is open. Something may answer, and in a graveyard that something already has a reason to be interested.

3) Do not point. At a stone, at a name, at anything that moves at the edge of the your vision. Pointing draws attention. Some say the finger that pointed would go stiff or start to hurt. Most just say it was rude and unwise.

4) Do not take anything. Not the flowers, the stone, the dirt, or anything else. Leave what is left by others. People who took a souvenir sometimes say the bad luck followed them home. A few say the haint did too.

5) Talk little, and only quietly. No laughing, no calling out. Make your words polite and soft. The dead are listening, and perhaps something else that sits with them is too. Finish your business and leave.

6) Be respectful. Read the names if you want. Pay your respects. Straighten a fallen flag or flower display.  Do not lean on the stones. Do not sit on them. Do not treat the place like a park. The people buried there are still somebody’s people.

7) No, you didn't see that. If you see something that does not belong, you did not see it. Same rule as the woods. Keep walking. Do not look twice. Do not tell anyone until you are well away from the graveyard.

The Haints

 

Haints are what people called the restless ones. Not every ghost. The ones that stay because they have unfinished business, or are angry, or simply do not want to leave. They can make a dog refuse to go near a porch, a baby cry for no reason, or a healthy person sick.

What people actually did when someone died: they covered the mirrors so the dead could not see themselves and stay. They stopped the clocks. They opened a window so the soul could leave. They sat up with the body all night so it would not be alone. They carried the coffin out feet-first so it could not look back and call someone else. Some painted their porch ceilings a pale blue, called haint blue, to keep spirits from settling at the house. Others left a light burning or salt on the sill.

None of it is dramatic, or performance for the sake of performance. It is just what you did so the dead stay where they belong and the living keep their own house.

The dead rest here. Give them respect in their home.

 

Between Shadows and Light, 

   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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Ad: The Scary Book of Christmas Lore. 50 Terrifying Yuletide Tales from Around the World: Discover the terrifying Yuletide fables, folktales, and folklore that have horrified kids (and adults) for generations during the holiday season. (Amazon link)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Europe’s Werewolf Trials

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

In the late medieval and early modern Europe, it was believed that some people could transform into dangerous wolf-like creatures. These "werewolves" could be involuntary transformations (from curses) or voluntary ones (through witchcraft or pacts with demons). From the fifteenth century into the early eighteenth, courts across much of Europe tried hundreds of men and women for transforming into wolves, attacking livestock, and devouring children. 

The early cases clustered in Switzerland, then spread through French- and German-speaking regions, and later into the Baltics. They peaked in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before fading.

Dutch historian Willem de Blécourt estimates several hundred prosecutions across Europe. One catalog by Elmar Lorey records roughly 280 known cases from about 1407 to 1725, with the heaviest concentration between 1575 and 1657. Claims of thirty thousand executions in France alone do not hold up, as de Blécourt traced the figure to a misreading of Pierre de Lancre’s 1611 account of the Labourd region.

Most werewolf accusations centered on a demonic pact. The accused supposedly received an ointment, belt, skin, or similar item that let them change form. Confessions, typically obtained under torture, routinely included cannibalism, child murder, and livestock attacks. The people charged were often marginal types, such as shepherds, beggars, hermits, or outsiders. 

 

Some cases may have involved real killers or actual wolf attacks on vulnerable people. Others look like scapegoating for unexplained deaths, disappearances, or hard years. Physicians of the time sometimes treated “lycanthropy” as a form of melancholia or delusion, yet courts still tended to treat the matter as criminal.

Some Famous Cases

• In 1521, French shepherds Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun confessed to a pact, an ointment, and eating children. They were burned. 
• In 1573–74, near Dole, France, the hermit Gilles Garnier, already known locally as the Hermit of St. Bonnot, was accused of killing and eating several children while in wolf form. Witnesses and his own statements (given under duress) described attacks in vineyards and near the woods of La Serre. He was burned in January 1574. 
• In 1691–92 in Livonia (now Latvia), an elderly man known as Old Thiess claimed to be a “good” werewolf who fought witches and the Devil in Hell to protect harvests. He was put on trail where judges tried unsuccessfully to force a Satanic pact narrative. So, he was merely flogged and banished rather than executed.
• The case of Peter Stumpp (sometimes rendered as Stubbe or Stumpf) in 1589 at Bedburg near Cologne remains the most notorious. The farmer confessed to a devil-given belt, years of murders including children, cannibalism, and incest. His execution was exceptionally brutal: skin torn with hot pincers, limbs broken, beheading, and burning. His head was displayed on a pole with a wolf likeness. Pamphlets spread the story across Europe.
• The last known werewolf trail was in 1853, in Galicia, northwestern Spain. But this one had a twist. The accused, Manuel Blanco Romasanta, claimed to be not guilty because of  his condition of lobishome (meaning werewolf). He was still found guilty of a number of murders, but Queen Isabella II commuted his death sentence. Blanco is now part of Spanish folklore as the Werewolf of Allariz.

Earlier medieval stories had often treated the werewolf differently. Marie de France’s Bisclavret, the Werewolves of Ossory in Irish tradition, and tales of cursed or noble knights trapped in wolf form could be sympathetic or ambivalent. They did not produce mass trials. The shift toward the demonic werewolf tracked the broader rise of diabolical accusations (witchcraft and demon pacts) in the fifteenth century. 

Real medical conditions such as hypertrichosis (excessive hair growth), clinical lycanthropy (the delusion of being a wolf), or rabies (which can produce aggressive, animal-like behavior) have been suggested as possible influences on some stories. These conditions are rare, and none account for the scale or pattern of the trials.

By the early eighteenth century the prosecutions largely ended. The pamphlets and trial records remained. So did the older question of what walks the boundary between human and beast when the night falls. Have you ever encountered a werewolf? 

Suggested Reading

• Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (1865). A classic nineteenth-century survey of European legends, trials, and folklore; public-domain editions are widely available. (Amazon link)
• Montague Summers, The Werewolf (1933). Gothic in tone and broad in scope; reprints key contemporary material on the Peter Stumpp case. (Amazon link)
• Willem de Blécourt, editor. Werewolf Histories (2015). Modern scholarly essays covering the major regions and the shift from medieval stories to early modern trials. (Amazon link)
• Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective (2020). The trial transcript of Old Thiess with comparative analysis of Baltic folk beliefs versus the demonic model. (Amazon link)

   

Between Shadows and Light, 

   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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The Brown Mountain Lights: Local Reports, Ghost Lanterns, and What the USGS Claims

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

Brown Mountain, NC

People in Burke and Caldwell counties of North Carolina have been watching lights over Brown Mountain for a long time. On clear nights after dark, especially in warmer months, you can sometimes see small, steady or drifting orbs along the ridge. Most are white or yellowish. A few pick up red or blue. They show up from overlooks on the Blue Ridge Parkway and from spots along Highway 181 looking across Linville Gorge. They are documented, and still hotly debated.

 

The best-known story attached to them is the lantern of a faithful servant. A planter or hunter went into the mountain and never came back. One of his people took a lantern and went looking. Neither returned. The lights are said to be that lantern still moving across the ridge. Scotty Wiseman turned the tale into the song “The Legend of the Brown Mountain Lights” (also recorded as “Brown Mountain Light”). Listen to it on You Tube.

Other versions talk about Cherokee women searching for warriors lost in an old battle, or a bride who vanished on her wedding night. These stories travel well, but they are obvious later additions. Printed accounts of the lights themselves start showing up around 1912–1913, right as electric lights and railroads were reaching the valleys. Earlier oral claims exist, including a 1771 note from surveyor John William Gerard de Brahm about "vapors" rising from the mountain.

Government people looked at the lights twice in the early years. In 1913 the U.S. Geological Survey sent D.B. Sterrett. He watched from the heights, checked train schedules, and said the lights were locomotive headlights on the Southern Railway lines in the valley. Locals were not convinced. 

 

A big flood in 1916 washed out tracks and stopped trains for weeks; some people said the lights kept appearing anyway, which would be impossible if they were train lights. In 1922 the Survey sent George R. Mansfield. He spent about two weeks on the ground, set up an alidade (a surveying telescope), and took repeated bearings on whatever lights showed. He plotted the results on maps that included the rail lines, roads, and houses.

Mansfield’s conclusion, published as USGS Circular 646 (reprinted in 1971), was straightforward. Of the lights he could measure, roughly 47 percent lined up with automobile headlights, 33 percent with locomotive headlights, 10 percent with stationary lights (houses, etc.), and 10 percent with brush fires. Some appeared to move or flare because of atmospheric refraction in the valley air. Through the telescope many stayed fixed even when the naked eye saw them dance. He did not find evidence for swamp gas, electrical discharge, or anything else exotic as the main cause. 

A 1977 experiment by a group of scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory aimed a powerful arc light from miles away; observers on the usual overlooks saw it as an orange-red orb sitting above the ridge. Distance, terrain, and night air do a lot of the work.

Those provide possible explanations for most of the classic reports. It does not close the file. Some people still describe lights that move low through the trees or stay on the slope itself rather than hovering above the crest where refracted valley lights would appear. 

 

Modern camera projects out of Appalachian State University have logged thousands of hours and ruled out a lot of ordinary sources; they have also recorded a few brief, unexplained orbs that do not match cars, trains, or campfires. Ball lightning and other atmospheric effects get mentioned as leftovers. 

 

No one has produced a single mechanism that covers every credible report. The lights that match the USGS maps are explained. The ones that do not are still open to debate.

If you want to look for yourself, the practical spots are the Lost Cove overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway (around milepost 310) and the pull-offs on Highway 181 south of the Parkway. I've looked. So far, I haven't seen anything I couldn't explain.

Clear, moonless nights after full dark give the best chance. Bring a map, know the road and rail corridors, and do not expect a show every time. Most nights you will see ordinary lights doing ordinary things. Some nights you may see something that does not line up. Good luck.

Suggested Reading

• The Brown Mountain Lights: History, Science and Human Nature Explain an Appalachian Mystery, by Wade Edward Speer. 

 

The ridge is still there. The reports continue. The explanations that fit the measurements are on the record. The rest is still being watched. Have you seen anything? If so, let us know in the comments.

 

Between Shadows and Light, 

   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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Share Your Cryptid and Paranormal Encounters

Dear Shadow Tribe,

I am collecting firsthand accounts of paranormal and supernatural encounters, with particular interest in cryptids such as Bigfoot and Thunderbirds.

If you have a story you are willing to share, you have two options:

• Post it in the comments section directly below this article.
• Send it by email to CadeShadowlight@proton.me.

 

You may submit anonymously. Please note that I may republish selected accounts on this site (with or without your name, according to your preference).

Exact locations are not required. I do ask for the state or region, and the county if you are comfortable providing it. General details about the environment, time of day, and what you observed are useful.

I am interested in clear, straightforward reports of what you experienced. Please, no embellishments. If you have photos, sketches, or other supporting material, please include them.

 

Between Shadows and Light, 

   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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Projects Bluebird and Artichoke: CIA Mind Control Before MKUltra

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

Most people have heard of MKUltra (read my post from last year). Fewer know the two programs that came before it.

It is the spring of 1950. The Korean War had not yet started, but the Cold War already underway. American officials had watched the 1949 show trial of Cardinal József Mindszenty in Hungary. The cardinal appeared broken. His confession looked unnatural. Similar cases in the Soviet sphere raised the same question: had the other side found a reliable way to make people talk, confess, or obey against their own will?

On April 5, 1950, Colonel Sheffield Edwards, chief of the CIA’s Inspection and Security Staff, sent a memo directly to the Director of Central Intelligence, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, bypassing the normal review process. The memo was too sensitive. Edwards proposed forming small interrogation teams, each with a psychiatrist, a polygraph operator trained in hypnosis, and a technician. The teams would use the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism to support covert operations. Hillenkoetter approved the request on April 20 under the name Project Bluebird and authorized an initial budget of about $65,515 (about $915,000 in 2026 money).

The stated goals were quite practical: improve interrogation of defectors and suspected double agents, learn how to protect U.S. personnel if they were captured, and gather intelligence on what the Soviets and their satellites were doing in the same area of research. Field work began almost immediately In October 1950, a Bluebird team worked on North Korean prisoners of war at a facility in Japan. Other early tests took place at U.S. interrogation sites in West Germany. The subjects were not told the real purpose of the sessions.

By mid-1951 the program was growing and the name changed. In August, Project Bluebird became Project Artichoke. Coordination moved to the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The scope widened. A January 1952 memo put the central question in plain language: could the Agency get control of an individual to the point where he would do its bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation? Researchers looked at hypnosis combined with drugs, forced morphine addiction and withdrawal, sensory isolation, and other methods meant to produce amnesia or compliance. LSD was already of interest and would become more central later.

Artichoke teams continued operational work overseas while research continued in-house. By 1954 internal CIA memos discussed a hypothetical case: could an individual be drugged at a social gathering, placed under Artichoke influence, and later induced to attempt an assassination against a foreign or American official without knowing he had been programmed? The team that reviewed the scenario judged it probably not feasible under the tight operational limits given, but the fact that the question was asked at all shows how far the thinking had moved in just four years.

These efforts did not produce a reliable, field-ready method of mind control. Drugs made people more talkative rather than more truthful. Hypnosis worked inconsistently on unwilling subjects. Still, the organizational machinery, the willingness to test on people who had not consented, and the basic research questions all carried forward. In April 1953, under the new Director Allen Dulles, the larger program known as MKUltra was approved. It absorbed and expanded what Bluebird and Artichoke had started.

The declassified memos from 1950–1954 are public. They sit in the CIA’s FOIA reading room, the National Security Archive, and the collections assembled after the 1970s congressional investigations. They show an agency that began with a defensive fear of Soviet techniques and quickly began testing offensive applications of its own. That sequence is the direct prequel to the MKUltra program covered in my earlier post.

Suggested Reading

• John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control (1979). Still the clearest narrative of Bluebird → Artichoke → MKUltra, built from the documents.
• Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2019). Strong on the people and the organizational shift from the early programs into MKUltra.
• Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse (1989). Broader on the medical experiments that grew out of this work. 

 

Between Shadows and Light, 

   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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The Not-Deer: When Something in the Woods Looks Not Quite Right

Dear Shadow Tribe,

In my Unwritten Rules of Appalachia post, Rule 6 was simple: if you see someone who looks not quite right, walk the other way. The rule covers more than people. It covers anything that is almost familiar but is still wrong.

A great example is the Not-Deer.

You are driving a two-lane at dusk or standing at the edge of a field when the light is going. Something stands in the usual place that deer stand. Size looks right. Color looks right. Your brain files it as a deer and keeps moving. Then the details refuse to settle. The eyes sit too far forward. The joints bend the wrong way or hold an angle no deer holds. The head turns unnaturally to track you while the body stays completely still. It does not bolt. It watches. Sometimes it takes a step toward you instead of away. The feeling arrives before you can name every wrong detail: that is not a deer.

Reports of this kind of animal cluster in the southern and central Appalachians, particularly western North Carolina (my personal neck of the woods), southwest Virginia, West Virginia, east Tennessee. The name “Not-Deer” itself is recent. It showed up on Tumblr around 2018 and quickly spread on TikTok and elsewhere as part of the wider dark Appalachia conversation. 

However, the experiences people describe are far older. This is not a new phenomenon. Folklorists collected accounts of wrong deer decades earlier. Hunters, hikers, and experienced outdoorsmen in the region have long said some of them simply do not look or act like ordinary deer. 

Image by Grok xAI

Some of the reports may be explained by disease. Chronic wasting disease and related problems make deer thin, uncoordinated, and less afraid of people. Those animals do look and act wrong, but they still look and act like sick deer. 

 

Disease does not move the eyes to the front of the skull or reverse the direction a joint bends. Nor does it make the eyes glow or produce the steady bipedal stance some witnesses describe. People who have field-dressed dozens of deer tend to know the difference between a sick animal and something else entirely.

Other explanations sometimes given include: an odd-looking, unknown deer species. A hybrid between a deer and a wolf (genetically not possible). Or a forest spirit wearing a deer disguise, but not getting it exactly right.

Older stories in the same mountains are similar: full of things that wear a familiar shape but still fail to get it exactly right. Cherokee accounts include Spearfinger, who could take the form of an ordinary old woman and then reveal the stone finger. Witches are said to move in animal skins or borrowed shapes. Mountain people talk of the neighbor who was almost the right height, almost the right walk, almost the right voice, and still not the person who lived down the road. The warning was the same one that became Rule 6: if it looks not quite right, do not get closer to check.

The Not-Deer is the animal version of that warning. What people are reporting is an animal that passes as a deer until you get a good look at it, then it obviously looks or acts wrong. The practical response has not changed. Do not approach. Do not stop the car to get a better look. Put something solid between you and it if you can, and leave. Most accounts end when the witness leaves. That is the safe outcome the old rule is intended to produce.

Suggested Reading

• Lesser Cryptids of Greater Appalachia, edited by Dawn Hilbert and Michael Fitzgerald. This is an anthology of original cryptid-themed folk horror stories by regional authors. It includes the short story “The Not Deer” by S.E. Howard. (Amazon link)

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   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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Macabre History: The Black Death, the Great Plague, and the Doctors in Beaks

Dear Shadow Tribe, 

The Black Death and the Great Plague were not the same event, but were the same disease, commonly called the bubonic plague. The Black Death cut through Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in the middle of the fourteenth century. The Great Plague usually means a later city epidemic of London in 1665. The beaked doctor people picture shows up in the seventeenth century, dressed for a theory of disease that will eventually prove wrong (miasma/dirty air).

The bacterium is Yersinia pestis, and it still exists. Rodents are the reservoir for the disease. Their fleas are the vector that carries the bacterium from host to host. Humans usually catch it from a flea bite. Left alone, the bubonic form settles in the lymph nodes and produces the swellings called buboes. It can move into the blood and into the lungs. Once in the lungs, pneumonic plague passes on the breath. 

The Black Death

The pandemic that would be called the Black Death began in Central Asia, reached the Black Sea and the Mediterranean around 1346–1347, and ran through Europe and the Mediterranean world, including Northern Africa, until about 1353. people at that time did not use the name. They said the pestilence, or the great mortality. “Black Death” is a later label for that specific wave.

The death toll is argued in the details and not in the scale. A third to three-fifths of Europe is the usual range. Tens of millions of people. Cities hired doctors at emergency rates because the ordinary ones fled or died. The city of Orvieto, in central Italy, contracted Matteo fu Angelo in 1348 at four times a normal fee. Pope Clement VI added doctors in Avignon. In Venice, of eighteen doctors in the city, one was still at work by the end: five dead, twelve fled. Those men were plague doctors in the job sense. They did not wear the costume and the beak at that time.

A 1373 note by Johannes Jacobi recommends masks for physicians. It does not describe them. No surviving evidence puts the bird mask in the fourteenth century. The plague doctor costume people think of is three hundred years later.

The Plague Never Fully Went Away 

The bacterium did not leave with the end of Black Death. Europe had plague outbreaks for centuries after 1353. Most were local. Some were bad enough to empty quarters of a city. The name “Great Plague” is not a second Black Death. In English it usually refers to the London epidemic of 1665–1666, with about 100,000 dead in the city, roughly a quarter of its population. Other places had their own great plagues: Naples and Rome in 1656, Vienna in 1679, and Marseille in 1720. Same organism, but less wide-spread. By then towns had boards of health, quarantine, and pesthouses. They also had the outfit.

The Beak of the Plague Doctor

Charles de Lorme, physician to Louis XIII, described the kit during a Paris outbreak in 1619. Waxed Moroccan goat leather: long coat, breeches joined to boots, gloves, hat. A mask with glass over the eyes and a beak about half a foot long, packed with herbs, vinegar, perfume, or theriac, a compound of dozens of ingredients that included viper flesh, myrrh, cinnamon, and honey. The idea was miasma, the bad air carried the pestilence. A long beak was supposed to give the herbs time to clean the breath before it reached the lungs. He also carried a rod, to point, to lift a sheet, or to keep a patient off him.

Paul Fürst, Der Doctor Schnabel von Rom

The picture that fixed the figure is later. In 1656, during the plague of Rome and Naples, Paul Fürst published an engraving of Doctor Schnabel von Rom, Plague Doctor of Rome. The doctor in the print frightens the living and picks over the dead. Naples lost about 300,000 people that year, roughly half the city. The beak was already a sign that the house you were entering was finished.

The costume was never standard issue. Most physicians who treated plague did not wear it. Some did. Two masks survive, both from seventeenth century Germany. The look lasted as a warning longer than it lasted as equipment. It appears again in images of the 1720 Marseille outbreak. After that it belongs to prints, theater, and masks.

The theory under it was wrong. The beak did not stop the fleas. A waxed coat may have kept some fleas off a man’s skin. That would have been an accident of the leather, not a success of the herbs. Pneumonic cases would have made it through the herbs and perfume unchanged.

The role is older than the costume. Cities were already paying men to walk into plague houses in 1348. The beak is a seventeenth-century object, tied to de Lorme’s 1619 description, the 1656 image from Italy, and the surviving masks from Germany. 

Current Events

The plague did not retire with the last European city outbreak. It still moves in rodent populations in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, including the United States. Cases still occur. Antibiotics stop it if they are given before the blood or the lungs are gone. 

 

In early October 2026 a Russian researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia died of a pneumonia that authorities are denying is tied to the pathogens she handled. The institute does work with Yersinia pestis. Contacts were watched. Official tests report no spread. The cause of her death is still unconfirmed as this is being written, and WHO is investigating. 

 

Suggested Reading:

• John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death. Narrative history of the fourteenth-century pandemic for a general reader.
• Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History. The demographic case for the high death toll.
• Paul Slack, Plague: A Very Short Introduction. Short, sober map of the disease from Justinian’s plague through the later European outbreaks.
• William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. The earlier pandemic, sixth century, same bacterium, different world.

 Between Shadows and Light, 

   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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The Men Who Sold the Dead

Dear Shadow Tribe,

My Waterloo teeth post asked what the living took from the dead and placed into the mouths of the living. This is the direct sequel: the body itself, not just the teeth.

From the mid-1700s into the 1830s, medical schools in Britain needed fresh bodies to teach anatomy. They could not get enough legally, so a trade grew up to fill the gap:  body snatching. The men in it were called Resurrection Men. They did not bring anyone back dead. Instead, they dug them up and sold them.

The shortage was written into the law. After 1752, the only bodies a school could take legally were those of executed murderers, handed over by the court for dissection. Hangings did not keep pace with the needs of the schools. London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow were turning out more surgeons every year, and each student was expected to dissect a corpse. There simply weren't enough even if they shared. 

A Legal Loophole

The workaround sat in a loophole in the common law. A dead body was not property, therefore you couldn't be charged with with theft. Take the body and leave the linen and coffin in the grave, and you hadn't stolen anything the courts recognized. That was the whole business model. Go in at night, work fast, pull the corpse out, refill the grave so it looked untouched, and be gone before dawn. Relatives hired watchers. Churches built iron cages, called mortsafes, over new graves. Gangs of  body snatchers still worked because the price was worth the risk.

 

Mortsafes, photo by Judy Wilson

A body in London in the 1810s and 1820s typically brought four to twelve guineas, sometimes more in the teaching season, when cold weather also kept the goods usable. A guinea was twenty-one shillings. A weaver in the East End might clear five shillings a week. Split among a gang of three or four, one night’s work could still beat a month of more honest labor. The big London outfit, the Borough Gang of Ben Crouch, supplied St Thomas’s and St Bartholomew’s teaching hospitals, and the private anatomy schools. 

 

One of the Resurrection Men, Joseph Naples, kept a diary for 1811–12. It reads like a delivery ledger: which churchyard, which hospital, what was paid, who had to be bribed to look the other way. The schools were the customers. They asked few questions and paid cash.

Burke and Hare, and Murder 

Edinburgh, Scotland, ran the same market, just smaller tighter, and even more macabre. In November 1827 a tenant died in a lodging house in Tanner’s Close owing back rent. No family came for the body. William Hare and his wife ran the house, and they sold the body to Dr Robert Knox, the most popular anatomy lecturer in the city, for £7 10s. Knox wanted a steady supply and taught in the Paris style, which meant a corpse for the students, not a diagram.

William Burke was a lodger and laborer who lived at that same lodging house. Burke and Hare did the arithmetic and skipped the churchyard entirely. Over the next ten months they killed sixteen people, mostly poor, old, drunk, or alone, the sort of folks nobody would miss quickly. The method was suffocation: one held the victim down, the other closed the mouth and nose. No wounds, so the body still looked like a natural death when it reached the table. The word “burking” came out of that. Knox’s assistants paid £8 to £10 a body and did not inspect too closely. Hare turned king’s evidence. Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829, then dissected in public. His skeleton is still in Edinburgh. Knox was never charged. The crowd burned him in effigy anyway.

Bishop, Williams, and May: the London Burkers

London eventually produced its own murderous gang. John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May already worked the churchyards. Bishop later claimed five hundred to a thousand bodies over twelve years, sold to St Bartholomew’s, St Thomas’s, and King’s College. In November 1831 they brought a suspiciously fresh boy to King’s College and asked twelve guineas. The school offered nine and then noticed the body had not been buried. Bishop and Williams were hanged that December. May was transported. The papers called them the London Burkers.

Parliament had tolerated grave robbery for decades because the schools needed the bodies and the victims were mostly poor. Murder made the arrangement indefensible. The Anatomy Act of 1832 did not stop the body snatching. It changed who did it and who got paid. Unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals could now be sent to the schools by law. The Resurrection Men lost their market almost overnight. The supply became the poor who died with no one to claim them, and the payment was made to an institution instead of a gang.

The living needed something the dead still had. The schools needed subjects. The gangs needed cash. After 1832 the state needed the schools supplied without a scandal. The corpse was the goods in every version of the deal. Only the middleman changed.

Similar questions as the teeth: If the only way to train the surgeon who might cut on you later was a body taken from someone who could not refuse, whose body should it be, and who should be allowed to sell it?

Suggested Reading

• Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987, revised 2001)
• Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (2004)
• Lisa Rosner, The Anatomy Murders (2009)

Between Shadows and Light, 

   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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Spearfinger (U'tlun'ta), Stone Witch of Whiteside Mountain

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

Visiting the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina? Beware of Spearfinger, the stone witch of Whiteside Mountain. The one who eats human liver. The Cherokee families had a name for her before any park road cut the Appalachian ridges: U'tlun'ta. It means someone who has a sharp part on them. In her case, a finger. English turned that into Spearfinger.

The fullest early write-up in English comes from James Mooney, a Smithsonian researcher who sat with Cherokee storytellers in the late 1800s and published Myths of the Cherokee in 1900 (Amazon link). 

Image by Grok, xAI.

She looks like an old woman. The difference is the body. Her skin is stone. Arrows break on it. On her right hand the forefinger is a long awl of bone. She keeps that hand closed or hidden under a robe. The closed fist is where her heart sits. She can also pick up huge rocks and stick them together just by knocking one against the other. Because of her stone hide she is sometimes called Stone-dress. She is not a giant, though she can do giant-like things. Mooney adds a warning that later writers ignore: there was another stone-covered killer in these mountains, and that one is a different story.

She eats human liver.

She does not have to chase. She simply becomes whoever gets close to her, perhaps a grandmother, mother or aunt. She calls the children over and offers to comb their hair. The finger works through the hair until the child sleeps. Then the awl goes in at the neck or the chest, the liver comes out, and the skin closes. No cut. No pain at the time. The child walks home, sickens over the next few days, and dies.

Hunters who met her away from the towns heard her singing to herself:

Uwe′la nátsĭkû′. Su′ să′ sai′. Liver, I eat it. Su′ să′ sai′.

The first line is the boast. Su′ să′ sai′ is the chant under it. It works like a drumbeat, not a second sentence.

Her footsteps on the ridges carried like thunder down into the towns along the Little Tennessee River. Birds flew up ahead of her. When the birds scattered and the thunder rolled, people knew she was on the move.

The Pit

The towns finally called a council. Mooney names Tomotley, Tenase, Settico, Chota, and their neighbors. They dug a deep pit, lined it with sharpened stakes, hid it under brush, and sent up a thick column of smoke. From Chilhowee Mountain she saw the smoke, thought the people were roasting chestnuts, and came at a run. Her feet knocked loose rock off the ridge. Up close she still looked like a frail old woman from the next town. She stepped on the cover and fell in.

The stakes shattered. The arrows shattered. She cut at them with her spearfinger from the bottom of the hole.

A titmouse landed overhead and sang a note that sounded like the word for heart. The warriors shot her chest and wasted their points. They cut that bird's tongue out for lying. Mooney says it flew straight up and never came back, and that the titmouse in the woods now is only a copy of the liar.

Then a chickadee dropped onto the closed right hand. One warrior took the hint and drove a point into the joint where the stone finger met the wrist. The hidden heart split. She fell. They cut the hand off and hung it outside the town as a warning to the other stone beings.

That is why the chickadee is called a truth-teller by the Cherokee. If it lands by the house while someone is away, the old reading is that he is coming home safe.

Cherokee storytellers still tell this. A later Eastern Band version, from Kathi Smith Littlejohn (Amazon link), keeps the same ending and lets a boy learn the secret after he frees a trapped bird. Same stone hide. Same hidden heart.

Where She Walked

Her home mountain in the old account is Whiteside, above the Cashiers and Highlands country in Jackson County (where I once lived, though I never met her). Cherokee speakers treated it as a thunder mountain. She also used the dark passes of the Nantahala, and on the Tennessee side the gap where Chilhowee comes down toward the Little Tennessee. One spot in that country still carried her name in the late 1800s: Spearfinger Place, in what is now Blount County.

She tried to shorten the walk. From a cliff called the Tree Rock on the Hiwassee, she started a bridge of stone through the air toward Whiteside. It reached too close to the world above. Lightning broke it. The people Mooney talked to said the broken pieces still lay along that ridge, and that anyone who went there could point them out. 

Suggested Reading

• James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900). 
• H. ten Kate, "Legends of the Cherokees," Journal of American Folklore (1889). A Western Cherokee version under the name Uilata.
• Barbara R. Duncan, ed., Living Stories of the Cherokee (1998). Includes Kathi Smith Littlejohn's "Spearfinger."

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Introducing Brother Cael, the Wandering Monk

Dear Shadow Tribe,

Brother Cael

Today the bookshelf gains a third plague doctor, Brother Cael (Amazon link). Erasmus still keeps the desk like a Renaissance scholar who wandered in and refused to leave. Corvus still walks the hedge roads in resin and paint. The new one is younger, thinner, and dressed for the road rather than the study. I am naming him Brother Cael, a monk but not yet a priest, walking the back roads bringing healing to the poor. 

He arrived as a hand-painted resin figure: wide studded hat, bronze beak, one glass eye behind the rim, gray robe, a satchel at the hip, prayer beads and a bell at the chest, more bells on the belt, a tank on his back, and a fumigator for the sickroom in his hand. He is a younger generation of plague doctor than Erasmus and Corvus. He has kept up with germ theory. He does not look like a city physician. He looks like a monk who left the enclosure and kept walking. Because he is.

Brother Cael

Cael carries two roots. I'm keeping both.

In Latin, caelum is sky and heaven. A rare clipped form, cael, shows up in old verse. To anyone who reads the hours in Latin, he is the brother under heaven, the one who still looks up.

In Irish, Cáel means slender. It is an old descriptive name, and in the Fenian tales Cáel is a warrior of the Fianna. That is the Celtic half, and it fits. He is young. Months on the road have already worn him thin.

He will not correct either reading.

The Road

Irish monks once practiced peregrinatio: they left the monastery on purpose and walked for Christ, sometimes with no plan to return. Cael is on that road. He brings what a monk-physician of the roads can actually bring. Herbs. Vinegar in the beak. A lancet. A fumigator. The psalms. A prayer. The Word of God in the language the people speak.

His mask is a tool against stench and bad air, not a costume. The fumigator is for the sickroom, not for show. The bells mark him coming up the hollow so no one has to guess what is at the door.

Erasmus haunts the books. Corvus gathers what the ditches still offer after dark. Cael keeps the hours on the road and stops where he is needed. He is not fallen unless the house that sent him decides he left without leave. Wandering is enough.

He claims a place with the other two. On the first night the censer was cold. By morning it smelled faintly of vinegar and dried herbs, which is either the paint or Cael settling in. I am not asking which.

Is he only resin? Maybe. The shelf is more crowded than it was, and the house is a little more watched. In House Shadowlight, that is rarely a complaint.

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   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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The Unwritten Rules of Appalachia

Dear Shadow Tribe,

Photo by Elijah Mears on Unsplash

The Appalachian Mountains are one of the oldest mountain chains on Earth, filled with ancient energies and dark mysteries, as well as unique ecosystems, flora and fauna. Here we have our own rules for surviving, passed down to us by our grandmothers. There are many of these lists, but no official ones. They varied from county to county, hollow to hollow, family to family.

The ones I heard growing up: 

1)  Don’t whistle after dark or in the forest. The sound carries, and something may answer. 

2)  Don’t answer if you hear your name called at night or in the forest, but cannot see the source. The dead, or something wearing their voice, is calling you. Do not go. Same goes for the sound of a crying baby in the forest (a reality: foxes, bobcats and many other animals can make sounds like babies). 

3)  Shut the doors, close windows and draw curtains after dark. You don't want something looking in. 

4)  Stay out of the forest from dusk to dawn if you can, especially if you are alone. Night is when both animals and the older stories are most dangerous.

5)  If the woods go completely silent, leave. Animals and insects go quiet for a reason.

6)  If you see someone who looks not quite right, walk the other way.

7)  Don’t rock an empty rocking chair. An empty chair that moves is said to invite a ghost or spirit to sit. People stop them with a hand if the wind starts them.

8)  Plant above-ground crops on a waxing moon, roots on a waning moon. Many still consult the Old Farmers Almanac (Amazon link).

9)  If you see something that does not belong, you didn’t see it. Don’t point, don’t announce it while you are still out there, just keep walking. Don't give it the attention it wants.

Between Shadows and Light, 

   Cade Shadowlight ☠ 

 

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